CloudBees has announced they are discontinuing their
RUN@Cloud PaaS and realigning their focus to Jenkins Continuous
Integration. Meanwhile, the Cloud specialists have announced a
partnership with Pivotal which encompasses two of the very powerful
cornerstones of IT: Cloud and Continuous Delivery (CD).

CloudBees’ CEO and co-founder Sacha Labourey gave us
some background on the changes to their strategy.

“Since day one, the vision of CloudBees is really to
provide an environment where companies and DevOppers can
immediately get onto new projects and continuously deliver the
application.”

“200% on Jenkins”

In the last year CloudBees, who received major funding
from
Verizon Ventures, came to realise that Jenkins, a key part of
their portfolio was rapidly growing, and Labourey claims this is
due to “shift from continuous configuration to continuous delivery
(…). Jenkins is being used by all teams within the organisation
to achieve CD and refine these kind of overall sidelines from code
to production”

This has radically changed the discussion CloudBees
are having with their customers and their business has grown
impressively. The team, which come from a JBoss background, quickly
realised there is an opportunity with Jenkins that should not be
missed.

But the decision to run with
Jenkins instead of PaaS
was a difficult one, Labourey explains. “We love PaaS, we think
it’s a defining technology but we thought the right thing to do for
the company was to focus 200% on Jenkins because of the enterprise
Jenkins company”.

CloudBees has announced that RUN@Cloud will go offline
on December 31, 2014, and that the company will help its customers
transition to another platform up to the end of October.

RUN@Cloud goes, DEV@Cloud stays

Labourey stressed that DEV@Cloud, a PaaS product will
remain a part of CloudBees’ portfolio. The company will continue to
invest in DEV@Cloud, and Labourey stresses that it is an important
part of their strategy. The aim is to ensure customers can come to
Jenkins not only on a cloud layer in the public cloud, but in also
a custom fashion.

“They own their AWS account instead of Jenkins
Enterprise on top. They should be able to leverage the AWS
environment for elasticity. And then finally, as a pure SaaS, they
don’t have to do anything, we handle all the management”

Partnering up with Pivotal

In other news, CloudBees has also announced a
cooperation with
Pivotal CloudFoundry. The two companies will collaborate in the
development of enterprise grade continuous integration and delivery
solutions for Pivotal CF PaaS. This means that Pivotal customers
will be able to benefit from continuous integration and continuous
delivery software for enterprises via a Jenkins Enterprise
add-on.

When asked if this partnership impacted the decision
to stop the cloud PaaS business, Labourey had the following to say:
“As soon as we decided to stop doing PaaS (as in runtime PaaS) it
became much easier for us to have that kind of discussion with
companies like Pivotal. We had been in touch with Pivotal for a
very long time, so they were very much interested in what we’re
doing on the Jenkins and DevOps side of the house.” Cloudbees
considers this to be the start of more partnerships to come.

When asked if Pivotal CloudFoundry is the logical
replacement for RUN@Cloud, Labourey explained that “A lot of
customers are actually on the public cloud. Pivotal as a company is
not very much focused on the public cloud. They’re very much
focused on the private cloud and letting their partners do the
public cloud, like IBM and so on. So we’re going to offer a choice
to our customers, some might want to migrate, some might go to
Amazon, some might want to go to Google…”

It might seem more than a coincidence that CloudBees
has dropped their RUN@Cloud PaaS, just as they announce a
partnership with their former PaaS rival Pivotal. Indeed, Labourey
says it’s no coincidence that they have only opened up to a
partnership with Pivotal now that they are no longer officially
competing.

But the CloudBees CEO emphasised to us that “this is a
partnership on the merits of Jenkins and the value of Jenkins to
Pivotal customers on premises…not a kind of trade where we stop
PaaS to obtain a partnership with Pivotal, or that we stop if our
customers go to Pivotal. So there is no relationship whatsoever
between where our customers are going to go, why we made the
decision and the partnership with Pivotal. Since we’re doing one
thing, it’s enabled our ability to make this partnership and makes
it very easy.”

Enterprise vs Open-Source Jenkins

There are several differences between Enterprise
Jenkins and open source Jenkins. Many customers are only looking
for support, so from that standpoint, it is not too different from
what JBoss or Red Hat are doing, Labourey explains. CloudBees also
find that customers are also interested in the added values
provided on the top of Jenkins. Jenkins offers a number of plugins
that enterprises will appreciate, such as the ability to do whole
days active control or cluster deployments.

Jenkins Operations Center (lovingly called ‘Jockey’ by
its creators) by CloudBees is a tool that makes it possible to
manage and operate Jenkins at scale. A typical use case for Jenkins
is in enterprises where teams end up with dozens and sometimes even
hundreds of masters and more build machines everywhere. Labourey
explains that “at this point there is a need to unify these
(machines) and to monitor all of these instances, to make sure that
you apply the right plugins to those instances. Maybe you might
want to start sharing resources among masters instead of having
strictly private resources.” A single master wants to be able to
share resources and apply the same security checks on all masters.
These are the kinds of things that Jenkins Operations Center
enables.

With the new focus on Jenkins, CloudBees are working
extensively on the workflow features. “A lot of customers are doing
CD on top of Jenkins but until now they had to use tricks to get
there and use types of pipelines. You would end up with lots of
tricky jobs, and so on. Jenkins has so many configurations with a
lot of tools that you could easily integrate. So the definition of
the pipeline itself was relatively awkward.”

The open-source community has been working extensively
on the “Jenkins Workflow” which is a very powerful way to define
sophisticated workflows. This will be released in Autumn but can
already be tested in the community. CloudBees will be providing a
number of other new features such as the visualisation of those
flows and monitoring features.

Sacha Labourey is founder and CEO of CloudBees, a Java as a Platform provider funded by Matrix Partners. He was longtime CTO of JBoss, both before and after the company’s acquisition by Red Hat (NYSE: RHT). Sacha played a crucial role in integrating and productizing JBoss software with Red Hat offerings, and later on served as co-GM of Red Hat’s JBoss Middleware division, with joint responsibility for the performance, go-to-market and delivery of JBoss solutions.